Sherry in a dream: what does it mean?
A fortified wine named after the town it came from, made by a system in which no bottle is ever from a single year.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to the blending. Every glass contains a little of many years, and he would ask what in the dreamer's account is a mixture of times rather than one.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note the system that does it. Wine is drawn from the oldest barrels and topped up from the next oldest, so nothing is ever emptied and nothing is ever pure.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Time and its passing appear in dream reports, and content analysis records such content among ordinary features of reported dreams.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
The English name is a corruption of Jerez, the town, so an entire category of wine is called by a mispronounced place.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
There is no vintage. Every glass has a little of a great many years in it and none of them can be separated out.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Something made of many times at once.
What are the genre conventions?
Rows of barrels stacked in tiers, the oldest at the bottom.
How to subvert it
Write the sherry from a single year.
Try this
Two hundred words about a mixture nobody can separate.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
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The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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